


When The Levee Breaks

by protect_the_fishboy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Bucky works at cat shelters it's great, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-20 21:54:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16563818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protect_the_fishboy/pseuds/protect_the_fishboy
Summary: Things are different, after the war.Steve thinks his life is finally starting to get back on track, whatever that means—he's three years sober, his graphic novel series, Gothic America, has gained a cult following, and Nick Fury, his gruff-but-lovable publisher, has given some purpose to he and Bucky's drifting across the United States. Now when they wake up in the middle of the night to flee the state, it's to investigate another one of America's urban legends.That is, until, New Orleans.Something feels different, this time. Something feels ancient and sinister. Something feels like it has no intention of letting Steve get out of this one with his new-and-improved life in tact.





	When The Levee Breaks

_**Queens, New York** _

_**2015** _

The first time it happens, it isn’t planned.

They can’t have been back for more than a month or two, sleeping tense nights on their stiff, uncomfortable mattress, their belongings still folded in duffel bags and suitcases. Steve doesn’t know which part of that is more depressing—that all their worldly possessions combined can fit into a few bags, or that they haven’t cared enough to unpack them—but it’s what they’re capable of just now. It’s a dingy little duplex outside of Queens, and more than once Steve has woken up covered in a cold sweat, his body screaming  _GUNFIREGUNFIRETAKECOVERWHERE’SBUCKYWHERE’S_ —only to see Bucky sitting upright in bed, face drawn and pale, _it was a car backfiring, I know, we’re safe._

Steve used to love the noise, the bustle. He guesses that’s another thing the war took from him.

Anyway, he doesn’t know why tonight is the last straw, why it sticks out among a veritable glut of other shitty nights, but when we wakes up gasping, everything in him is telling him to run.

“Buck,” he manages, fumbling blindly for his hand or his leg or something, anything he can reach. “Buck, I—I need to go.”

Bucky tilts his head to the side, face carefully blank. “Steve—?”

“I have to go  _now_ ,” Steve says, and throws back the covers, staggering on the carpet, tripping over empty liquor bottles that he is very much not going to think about, thanks, stuffing piles of dirty laundry into the nearest open duffle. “I can’t fucking—”

“Steve.” 

“Bucky, I know, okay, but I need to go, I can’t explain it, I just can’t fucking, I—”

Bucky takes one of his hands. “ _Steve_.”

He looks up, panting.

“We’ll go, okay? We’ll go. I thought you’d never ask.” Standing face to face like this, Steve can see exactly the circles under Bucky’s eyes are, how his forehead is clammy, his brow furrowed in pain. Guilt pools in his stomach.

It’s not that he forgets that he’s not the only one struggling, here. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. He has just, for possibly the first time ever, found himself incapable of worrying about anyone other than himself. He can’t lay on the wire for Bucky, because the wire has already sliced him open like an apple, diced his insides to pieces. His recovery—if you can call it that, he can’t remember the last few days because he was blackout drunk, yeah, Steve’s not fooling himself, unfortunately—he’s become selfish.

But Bucky looks so sick, exhaustion carving out hollows where there used to be laugh lines. So Steve cups his cheek with a shaking hand.

“Hey. I know, okay? We’re going. But we can’t go if you can’t get your shit together. First you breathe.” Bucky gently moves the hand on his cheek down to his chest, so Steve can feel it moving up and down, steady, even. “Then we pack. Then we go. Okay? We can go.”

Steve lets his eyes close for a second. He is crazy and he is an alcoholic and they’re leaving New York and he is stupidly, selfishly in love with this man.

“Okay,” he says finally. Swallows. Nods.

“Okay.” Bucky smiles, the saddest, most beautiful thing in the world.

In the end, packing takes depressingly little time. Steve doesn’t know how they’ve managed to live here for as long as they have with only a few coffee cups and a bag of plastic cutlery to their name, but at least it makes this breakdown of his easier. When they climb into Steve’s pickup truck, his desperation gives way to fear, and he looks over at Bucky with wide eyes.

“Hey,” Bucky says, because Bucky is perfect and angelic and always knows what to say, God damn it, “just drive, right? You can do that. I taught you that. I regret it, but I did teach you.”

“Still haven’t let that go, huh?” Steve starts the engine, puts the car into drive.

“You hit the only car in the parking lot.”

“I didn’t see it!”

“It was bright red.”

“I’m colorblind!”

“You were literally in the military, dumbass.  _Colorblind_. Right. You’re colorblind, and I have two fucking arms.”

They both pause, Steve focusing very intentionally on the stoplight ahead of them. They haven’t really addressed it quite so directly, yet, but impossibly, Steve feels a bubble of hilarity rising in his chest, and oh my God he cannot laugh at his amputee boyfriend’s amputee joke right now, oh my  _God_ , but then he hears Bucky snort in amusement, the start to an honest-to-God giggle, and there’s nothing left to stop the laugh that claws out of Steve like something unfamiliar and alive.

So that’s how it starts. By the time their conversation peters out after hours of trading increasingly mortifying memories and invented sexcapades (Bucky:  _Steve, shut your beautiful lying vanilla mouth, you topped me once and CRIED_ ; Steve:  _Don’t disrespect our fucking troops like this_ , James; Bucky:  _Heh heh, ‘our fucking troops’ indeed_ ; Steve:  _oh my God_ ), the sun is creeping up and they’re somewhere in Ohio, Steve notes with a pang of regret. The ridiculousness of what they’ve done is hitting, and Steve laughs, the sound of it tinged with hysteria.

“We’re not gonna get our security deposit back!”

Bucky raises his eyebrows. “Who are you, even? Did I just cross state lines with a boy scout?”

“If being a boy scout means valuing the importance of a leasing contract, then yes!”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Obviously.” (Steve is not, in fact, fucking with him.)

So their first runaway house is a rickety little off-white thing. Bucky likes it for its wraparound porch, and Steve likes it for the faded siding, the patchy roof, the buckling paint and broken shutters. Steve likes fixing things he can hold in his hands.

Time passes in strange lurches and lulls for a while, punctuated only by the taste of liquor and whether or not it comes back up, paint smeared on his hands, thick lines of ink that he doesn’t remember drawing. He wasn’t foolish enough to think their fragile peace would last, not in this house, not in Ohio, but it doesn’t hit a breaking point until the night Steve drinks until his stomach stops rejecting the stuff and his tongue goes a little numb, the only thing properly coming into focus in his narrow field of vision his sketchbook, painting after painting of blood and fire, and he screams, maybe,  _BLOODFIREGUNFIREWHERE’SBUCKYWHERE’SBUCKYWHERE’S_  and someone else’s hands are trying to rip the whole fucking thing in half, the whole liquor-stained, water-bloated goddamn thing,  _KILL IT, KILL IT,_  and someone else’s hand, singular, is trying to be everywhere at once,  _no, Stevie, please, don’t, they hurt because they’re important_  and someone else’s hand, where are all these hands coming from, someone else’s fist is flying toward that perfect face,  _WHERE’SBUCKYWHERE’SBUCKYWHERE’S_ —

Bucky is on the floor.

Bucky is on the floor and he is crying.

No Bucky no don’t hurt.

“I’m here, Steve,” he says after a moment in a voice that trembles. “But where are you?”

Steve sinks to his knees, hand half-raised where he considered brushing it across the fresh red mark on Bucky’s cheekbone but thought better of it.

The fresh red mark he left.

“This is so incredibly fucked up,” he whispers around his clumsy tongue, only dimly registering that it is the wrong thing to say.

“Yeah,” says Bucky, laughing humorlessly. “It is. Because where ARE you, Steve? I need you here. With me.  But you’re drinking, you’re drunk, you’re—I don’t even want to  _think_  about what you do all day while I’m at the shelter, and my arm hurts, Steve. Hurts really fucking bad.”  

He blinks stupidly. “Did you...hurt it?”

Bucky’s face hardens. “My  _left_  arm, Steve. The arm that ISN’T FUCKING THERE.”

Bucky is shouting.

Bucky is shouting and he is shouting because he is in pain.

Oh, Bucky. Bucky, of course you hurt.

“We went through hell. TOGETHER. And we’re back there,” and oh, God, his eyes are welling with tears, fresh ones, Steve’s heart is breaking,  _Bucky_ , “but I’m ALONE, because you’d rather drink tequila. I can’t do this without you, and you’re making me.”

“I wouldn’t  _rather_  be drinking,” says a voice that most certainly cannot be Steve’s, because his throat is raw, closed up, aching. “It’s not...I can’t choose anymore. It’s not...my choice.” His tongue is slow, stupid, but Bucky understands, because Bucky is so much more than Steve has ever deserved.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, very quietly, and moves to where Steve is still on his knees, lets him press his face into his stomach, kisses the top of his head. “Fuck. I think it’s time we listened to the pamphlets, sweetheart.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” Bucky says, “but it’s okay, because you’re here. You’re here with me now.”

Steve feels Bucky’s stomach contract, hears a little grunt of pain, and that, more than anything else, sobers him a little. Enough, at least, to bring himself painfully to his feet, ease Bucky to the side until he can support his weight.

“I’m here with you,” he murmurs.

“Til the end of line,” Bucky says, his voice grating in a way that sounds painful, still a little too wet for Steve’s liking. It hurts, those words, the weight of the memory behind them almost too much to bear. 

“Let me see what I can…” The world spins, and he tightens his grip around Bucky’s waist. “What I can do about that arm.”

Bucky comes with him, to the first few meetings. They know damn well that people bring non-alcoholic people to AA for moral support all the time, but they still spend a disproportionate amount of time crafting a fake alcoholic backstory for him. His name is Jim, short for Jimothy, (Steve:  _Oh, you think that’s funny, do you? A little over the top for a name, Mr. James Buchanan?_ ); his wakeup call to finally seek treatment was when he was passed out drunk on the job at a Twinkie factory, leading to a catastrophic accident with the filling. They concoct this story laughing as they pour all the liquor in the house down the sink, and Steve pretends the tears that spring to his eyes are from mirth.

The real trouble is filling his days. He picks Bucky up from work at 5 sharp, now that he’s generally sober enough of the time to be a reliable driver; until then, he drifts. His pension keeps his unemployment from being a burden, but he’s painfully bored, with a painfully long window of time in which to think about things he most definitely does not want to think about,  _Bucky bleeding and  dying and still, Steve’s hands covered in his blood, he is already cold_ , thanks, brain, and painfully close to a liquor store. Steve goes on runs. He picks up the newspaper from the end of the driveway. He sits in the dark, their living room still characteristically barren of furniture, just a blanket and some pillows on the floor, a sad little CRTV plugged into the wall for which they never bothered setting up cable.

All of this is to say, when Steve’s flipping halfheartedly through the paper, sees an ad for  _ARTIST WANTED! THE WEREWOLF OF DEFIANCE - HAS HE FINALLY MADE HIS LONG-FEARED RETURN?_ , he doesn’t skip it the way he skips almost everything else when he “reads” the news. Apparently, it’s some kind of contest, best drawing wins, whatever.

But Steve is bored, and Steve is desperate, so he boots up the laptop—a decrepit mammoth of a thing, one that wheezes whenever it’s forced to process anything beyond Internet Explorer—and types haltingly into the search engine:  **please show me pictures of the defiance ohio werewolf thank you**

The search returns— _did you mean ‘defiance ohio werewolf pictures’?_ —more than Steve expected, namely some drawings, some poorly edited photos, and a link to a website proclaiming to tell the true story of the Defiance Werewolf. Steve, feeling increasingly ridiculous but also increasingly desperate, reads.    
  


_The Defiance OH Werewolf_  
From late July to mid-August of 1972, residents of Defiance, OH, reported sightings of a werewolf. The sightings began in the early morning hours on July 25, when a railroad worker was attacked by what he described as a man with an animal's head who carried a two-by-four. The railroad worker was struck on the shoulder and received minor wounds. The werewolf escaped back into the darkness. The werewolf would later attempt to attack two other railroad   
workers in a similar fashion but they managed to escape the beast. A woman who lived next to the railroad tracks had a neighbor call the police to advise them that for several nights at around 2:00 AM, something rattled her front door knob and attempted to gain entry into her house. Another woman claimed that something scratched fiercely at her front door. The woman told the police that if whoever it was ever managed to break in that she would shoot it. Other residents reported strange scratching or clawing as if something was trying   
to gain entrance into their homes as well. Drivers reported seeing it along roadsides. Several residents reported being stalked while walking at night.   
Local police dubbed the beast "the wolf man" while most residents tended to call it "the thing". The police took the sightings seriously as one man had been injured in an attack. Descriptions of the beast were all consistent, circa 6-8 ft tall, hairy, having what was described as an "animal's head" with large fangs, dressed in jeans and a shirt, and barefoot with fury feet. The creature was reported to move like a caveman. Interestingly, the beast attacked during a full moon. By mid-August sightings of the werewolf diminished and the beast appeared to have disappeared into the darkness once and for all.  
  


Steve, impossibly, feels the hair on the back of his neck prickling, not with fear, but with excitement. His hands itch for his art supplies, for his long-dead sketchbook, and—oh.

If he wants art supplies, he’ll have to buy them.

He bites his lip. There’s still an hour until Bucky needs to be picked up, and he could always buy supplies on the way home, if this bug is still nagging him...it would make Bucky happy, probably, to see him quote  _taking an interest_  unquote…

After a moment of hesitation, Steve opens  whatever word processing software this thing is equipped with—Word 2003, apparently—and starts writing. He’s surprised that once he starts, he can’t stop, the newspaper ad all but forgotten. It asked for a drawing of the werewolf, but Steve is so much more interested in the railroad worker, how he must have spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, questioning every shadow, his entire reality shaken by what was dismissed by everyone save a few nutty locals as an urban legend. He writes feelings, what he imagines the man felt, what he would have felt, writes down ideas for color pallets, comic panels, plot and form and style. He hasn’t done anything like this since his brief stint at art school, and his hands are thrumming with energy, unable to keep up with his brain’s steady output of creativity.

He’s jolted out of his trance by his phone buzzing in his pocket. Shit. He’d forgotten Bucky, like the world’s worst fucking boyfriend.

“Bucky! I’m on my way! Have I mentioned that I am head over heels in love with you!”

Bucky’s quiet on the other end of the line. “Um.”

Steve supposes the is the most animated Bucky’s heard him in a while. He doesn’t quite have the heart to explain that it’s not exercise or nutrition or companionship or group therapy that has renewed his lease on life or whatever the fuck, but rather a creepy story he found by chance about the town they happen to live in at the moment. “I’ll explain in the car. I’m coming!”

He laughs at that. “Okay, weirdo. See you then.”

“See you then,” Steve echoes. They don’t say I love yous or goodbyes very often anymore. Always  _see you then_  or  _see you later_  or sometimes just  _you_.

When Steve climbs into his pickup truck, he’s not thinking that his flight of fancy will land him on a new and extraordinarily bizarre career path. He’s thinking about whether or not he should further prolong picking up Bucky by getting donuts first, the really obscene ones Bucky never admits to loving, with icing in the middle and an ungodly amount of sprinkles. Really, he’s not even thinking about it when that night it’s Bucky who wakes him up urgently, shaking and sweating,  _Steve. Let’s go. We did it before. Please, let’s do it again._

And if he waits until Bucky’s asleep in the passenger seat to pull over and tap out on his phone, which he is shockingly more adept at using than the sad laptop, **please list U.S. cities with urban legends thank you,**  and immediately heads south as soon as he processes the words  _Mothman; Point Pleasant, Virginia,_  well. Even then, he’s not thinking it means anything.

The little rickety house in Ohio is their first runaway home, but it is not their last.

* * *

**NOW**

In group, they tell Steve that describing emotion is very important, no matter how strange or imprecise. They throw out words like  _emotional avoidance_. They look at Steve with sad, concerned eyes. They tell him, _when you feel it, think about it. Hold onto it. Describe it._

Steve has tried to catalogue the Big emotions, the ones he thinks they’re worried about, but they splinter. He fumbles around feelings like pain—precise, like a scalpel. Sharp, like a knife. Jagged, like broken glass. But there’s no Steve in that, really. It’s all been said before. It’s all been felt. There’s no room for Steve to t _hink about it, hold onto it, describe it._

So Steve holds onto other feelings instead, tucks them into his front shirt pockets like baseball cards. Bucky’s nose against his shoulder in the morning, his long hair tickling the bare skin there, reminding him vaguely of cuddling with a very warm, very muscular dog,  _Jesus, Stevie, no one compares their boyfriend to a dog you useless fucking weirdo_ , an eyeroll, a forehead kiss. Black coffee, settling in his stomach, like—like something. Like summer rain, warm and heavy. Like a good bass line, one you can feel all over. Throwing a punch, flesh against punching bag (against piles of gym mats, against walls, against skin, _c’mon, Steve, not here, not right now_ ), like...like cello strings, a single, solitary note. Like a loosed arrow. A cold beer, or two, or seven—well, no. No, Steve doesn’t do that anymore. An asthma attack tingling in his chest, reliable, solid, real. His inhaler, cold, restorative. God, he remembers when asthma was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Now it’s one of two things that grounds him. Asthma, comma, Bucky.

The point is, Steve catalogues moments carefully, like some kind of museum curator; he just stops when they start to point him toward gunshots, or fire, or blood, even though he guesses that’s the point of the exercise. When that happens, he goes very pale. He finds Bucky, worms himself as close to his chest as possible, and listens.

Bucky’s heartbeat. Like a milkshake with two straws. Like a soft, civilian sort of safety.

“You’re alright.” Bucky’s voice. Too important for similes, too precious. “You’re not there.”

“I’m not there,” Steve replies quietly, and then bites his lip.

“Just say it. That’s what we do now, right? To get over the thing, you have to say the thing.”

Steve crushes his face into Bucky’s chest, just a little. Just because he can. “It’s kind of mean.”

“Sounds  _exciting_.”

Steve smiles, and he kind of hates himself for it.

“I was just thinking...I mean, no offense, Buck, but. I was just thinking that I was supposed to be the one who was good at coping.”

Steve feels Bucky’s laugh more than hears it, and he wonders if, PTSD or no PTSD, he’ll ever feel this content again.

“You’ve coped, Stevie. We coped. This is just...maintenance. This is normal, I think.”

It might be true. They’ve been back from over there for three years, and Steve’s been sober for two of them. This doesn’t happen often. Just sometimes.

“Some days are bad,” he says out loud, before he’s really decided to say it out loud.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, they are.”

* * *

Bucky’s good at not asking too many questions, after. Maybe that’s why when he asks, quiet, while Steve is brushing his teeth, “What if I’m not there? I mean...I’m assuming I’m pretty much always there, but...I guess what I’m asking is, is it always that bad?” Steve shakes his head instead of answering.  

Steve shakes his head and very resolutely does not say a damn thing.

* * *

By the time they’ve packed up everything, Steve’s shirt is plastered to his chest with sweat, and mercifully, so is Bucky’s. He stares, rather obtrusively, and takes a swig of his Coke—they always buy the glass bottles. There’s just something about the familiarity of smooth glass in his hand. He’s not going to overanalyze it.

“Did you just honest-to-God lick your lips? I didn’t realize I was dating a horny 14-year-old.”

“I didn’t realize I was dating a prude,” Steve says, and smiles into a kiss. They get like this, when they move, the kind of disgustingly-in-love antics Steve remembers from high school hallways and the back rows of movie theaters. They’re always touchy, but there’s something different when they load up the pickup truck, which has seen them through hundreds of thousands of miles, 27 different houses in 27 different states. Steve’s not going to overanalyze that, either.

“Fury is so pushy,” Steve complains when he feels his phone buzz for the umpteenth time. “Can’t a guy make out with his boyfriend like...like a….”

“Horny 14-year-old?” Bucky provides.

“I’m an adult,” Steve forges on. “I don’t need 14 text reminders. I liked this better when we just woke each other up in the middle of the night.”

“No you didn’t,” Bucky says, suddenly very soft.

“No. No I didn’t.”

“Personally,” Bucky continues, his tone light and teasing again, “I would die for that scary, scary man.”

Steve rolls his eyes, but it’s true. It’s Nick Fury and his hardass publishing guidelines that have given some structure, albeit a fairly loose one, to Steve and Bucky’s nomadic life. Like essentially every other good thing in his life, it was Bucky who pushed him into it—once he  made three issues of his urban legend comic, a series he’s tentatively calling Gothic Americana, exploring the Defiance Werewolf, Virginia Mothman, and the ghosts of Slaughterhouse Canyon in California, respectively, Bucky pressed him to submit them for publication to anywhere that might even remotely consider taking them, including S.H.I.E.L.D., a publishing company whose acronym remains a mystery to them. They paid him a ridiculous advance and continue to pay him a ridiculous salary, far more than he ever would’ve expected to make as a comic book artist, in exchange for directing he and Bucky’s treks across the country and Steve’s adherence to strict deadlines. Fury offered other perks, too, among them a S.H.I.E.L.D. company van that was far less of a gas guzzler than Steve’s beat-up Chevy, but both he and Bucky have grown strangely attached to it.

Steve’s too disillusioned to trust this, but for now, it’s a good thing.

Bucky smiles at him, laughing a little in response to Steve’s eyeroll, brushing away a few stray hairs with his prosthetic hand, unflinching.

It’s a really, really good thing.

* * *

“Hey Buck, can you give me a hand?” Steve calls through the cracked-open window, juggling the gas nozzle and the cell phone cradled between his cheek and his shoulder. “I left my wallet in the car.”

There’s a beat of silence before Bucky, completely deadpan, removes his prosthetic and shoves it through the window.

“Bucky, this joke was funny...the first forty-seven times.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Fury’s voice is low and intimidating in Steve’s ear, but he’s talked to the man enough now to hear thinly veiled amusement when he hears it.

“Oh, nothing, just a ten-hour drive, an EXTREMELY ANNOYING, EXTREMELY UNHELPFUL—”

“—INCREDIBLY  ATTRACTIVE,  ENDLESSLY CHARMING, WILDLY INTELLIGENT,” Bucky shouts from the car.

“—boyfriend sitting with HIS FEET UP while I pump the gas, annoying boss who’s called me fifty-six times today…”

“And to think, all you had to do was pick up one of fifty-five times.”

“Funny.” Steve’s wallet thwaps him gently on the cheek, thank you very fucking much James Buchanan Barnes, and he jams his debit card into the slot, re-hanging the nozzle with a huff before half-heartedly flipping Bucky the bird.

“I was just calling to see where you’re at, when we can expect you to get started. Sounds like you’re stopped at a gas station, again—”

“Really, Fury, we appreciate it, but we’re keeping the truck. And we’re five hours in, but I can’t exactly give you an estimate on when I’ll get started when I don’t even know what I’m going for yet.”

“As long as we have a draft by Friday,” Fury says.

“I’m offended. I thought you were just calling to chat.”

“I’ll fight him!” Bucky pipes up. His fucking arm is still stuck in the window. Steve’s impressed that he managed to chuck the wallet through.

“I might let you. You could take him. He only has one eye, you know.”

“Don’t be ableist, Steve. Only we get to make those jokes. Speaking of which, shut up, because together Fury and I make a three-armed, three-eyed hellbeast and I think that’s beautiful.” Seemingly satisfied with himself, Bucky settles back in his seat.

“Don’t miss the deadline,” Fury says drily after a moment, and abruptly hangs up.

“You made him hang up on me.” Steve grabs his receipt and Bucky’s entire goddamn arm before settling in the driver’s seat with a grunt.

“You love when he hangs up on you.”

“Yeah. Best boyfriend,” Steve says, and puts the key in the ignition.

* * *

“So...where are we going, exactly?” It apparently only occurs to Bucky to ask this on hour seven, while Steve hums absently along to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

He stalls for a minute, pretending to think, and then says, very quietly, “Uhnowherereallyjustneworleans.”

Bucky pauses. “Come again?”

“It’s New Orleans, Bucky, but before you freak out—”

“Steve!” Bucky says shrilly, and Steve would mercilessly mock him for it if it was about anything else. “New Orleans? As in the city that never sleeps? As in—”

“—that’s New York City, babe, we’re literally  _from_  New York, how do you not know tha—”

“—as in, more liquor per capita than person? As in—”

“—that sounds like a made up fact, and really—”

“I’m  _serious_ ,” Bucky says, and his voice cracks, shutting Steve up instantly. He reaches over and puts a hand on Bucky’s knee.

“So am I, Buck,”  he says, very softly, after they’ve ridden like that for a long moment. “I’m sober. I’m  _extremely_  sober. And I’m not exactly going there to...to saunter down Bourbon Street, or whatever. There’s so much history, and so much to dig through, and I have to both find my story and have a draft of it for Fury in four days. I won’t even have time to be tempted.”

“That’s not how it works,” Bucky says, but his resolve is softening. Steve happens to know that New Orleans has been on his bucket list since they were high schoolers.

“It’s not, but we’ll keep ourselves busy, right? The French Quarter, the Garden District, the cheesy ghost tours…”

“The liquor,” Bucky says, but he’s fighting a smile.

“I’ll be fine, sweetheart,” Steve says, and fights the urge to take his hand off Bucky’s knee, to run from this overt showing of affection, vulnerability, and other very scary things. “Because you’re right here with me.”

“Til the end of the line, blah blah blah,” Bucky mutters, but he puts his hand on Steve’s, still sitting on his knee, and squeezes. “New Orleans, huh. Why couldn’t you have told me earlier? I need so many guidebooks.”

“Check the backseat,” Steve says, because hi, long-term partner of Bucky No Surprising Bone In His Entire Body Barnes.

“I almost forgive you,” Bucky says haughtily, and Steve throws him a pack of gel pens—because seriously, no surprising bone—and turns up the radio.

* * *

Steve manages to stave off the panic until he and Bucky are curled together like a couple of pill bugs in the place Fury set up for them, a small white house that has become their signature in every state they’ve ever lived. They’re both so tired that they barely look at it, barely register its surroundings, some swampy town outside of the main city. It’s only when he hears Bucky’s breath even out in sleep that he lets himself squeeze his eyes shut, trembling, and breathe very quickly through his mouth.

He’s sober, but when he wakes up at night, now, he still remembers the taste of it—of anything, bourbon or scotch or vodka or tequila, the burn that would settle in his stomach before settling his nerves, blocking out everything else.

The screams. The blood. The fire.

Trying to keep quiet, he shuffles around to rest his ear on Bucky’s chest, and Bucky stirs but doesn’t wake, tightening his grip around Steve in his sleep. Somewhere between the  _bloodfirebloodfireblood_ , Steve remembers Bucky’s questions from earlier.

_What if I’m not there? I mean...I’m assuming I’m pretty much always there, but...I guess what I’m asking is, is it always that bad?_

 

 _Sometimes_ , Steve thinks, and keeps his eyes tightly shut against the onslaught of memory, against the night in this empty, unfamiliar house, against anything at all, really. _Sometimes, it’s worse._


End file.
